World · Agricultural Land · % of land area

## What this measures

The share of land area in the world used for farming: arable land (temporary crops, meadows, market gardens and land left fallow), permanent crops such as orchards and coffee, and permanent pasture. Yearly from 1961.

## Why it matters

Farmland is the largest human use of land. Read beside crop yields it shows whether food comes from farming more land or from getting more out of the land already farmed, and it is the main pressure on forests.

## How to read it

Annual, dated December 31 of the reference year. Moves are slow; a fall can mean land returned to forest or lost to cities. The world value is the World Bank's own aggregate.

## What it does not say

Pasture dominates the total in many places and its definition varies between countries. It says nothing about how intensively the land is farmed.

## Source

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAOSTAT), via World Bank World Development Indicators, indicator `AG.LND.AGRI.ZS`. Licence per the World Bank's indicator metadata: CC BY 4.0. Palanor reads it each month (/api/cron/worldbank-sync) and rewrites the history, so revisions carry through.